Flat Lens Promises Possible Revolution In Optics (bbc.com)

An anonymous reader shares a BBC report: A flat lens made of paint whitener on a sliver of glass could revolutionize optics, according to its U.S. inventors. Just 2mm across and finer than a human hair, the tiny device can magnify nanoscale objects and gives a sharper focus than top-end microscope lenses. It is the latest example of the power of metamaterials, whose novel properties emerge from their structure. Shapes on the surface of this lens are smaller than the wavelength of light involved: a thousandth of a millimetre. "In my opinion, this technology will be game-changing," said Federico Capasso of Harvard University, the senior author of a report on the new lens which appears in the journal Science. The lens is quite unlike the curved disks of glass familiar from cameras and binoculars. Instead, it is made of a thin layer of transparent quartz coated in millions of tiny pillars, each just tens of nanometres across and hundreds high.PetaPixel has more details.

Comments

Re:fucking flash player

[Andreas Mayer]

why does stupid bbc insist on flash player??? They know where the world is heading, no?

Change your browser's user agent to 'iPad' and videos will work without Flash.

Canon's Diffractive Optics taken to a new level

[dgatwood]

Sounds like they've taken Canon's Diffractive Optics to a new level. Basically, DO uses Fresnel lenses with smaller ribs. This raises the bar to nanoscale features, which should result in even less distortion and other problems. I, for one, welcome our new superzoom overlords. I'm envisioning a lightweight 16-600 that will outperform everything on the market today by a large margin....

Re:Canon's Diffractive Optics taken to a new level

[doublebackslash]

It isn't the same as a Fresnel lens.
The scale of these features are below the wavelength of light. That means that these structures interact with the electromagnetic field in a way that allows for a negative refractive index, which is impossible using conventional optics, rather than bending the light in steps like a Fresnel lens. This is more like an array of phased antennae, but small enough to work with light's high frequency. They have been doing similar things with microwaves for something like a decade or so.
Google image search for microwave metamaterial. It will show you what sort of thing these pillars are mimicking, but on the order of millimeters instead of nanometers.